Three months before a wall of water, mud and rock killed hundreds when it hurtled down a Himalayan valley bordering Nepal and China, experts and officials from both countries met in Kathmandu to discuss the risk of such disasters.
At the May 27 meeting in Nepal’s capital, 10 officials from Nepal and about a dozen from China, including the Tibet region where the disaster struck, discussed bolstering cooperation to monitor and respond to floods, weather and glacier-related hazards, an agenda prepared by the Nepalese side showed.
The participants called for joint risk-reduction measures, including inventories of glacial lakes and hazard mapping.
Illustration: Yusha Illustration: Mountain People
However, two Nepalese officials said they did not receive as much information as they wanted from China on glacier risks and water levels after the meeting, and they feared insufficient data sharing could hamper their ability to anticipate and prepare for major disasters.
“What we actually wanted from them, and still want, is if there are early movements of glaciers and early movements around that area, we would want to know a bit early,” said Nepalese Flood Forecasting Division hydrologist Sauhardra Joshi, who was in the May meeting.
No officials or experts have blamed either side for the natural disaster, which is estimated to cost one-10th of Nepal’s annual economic output to recover from. Nepalese officials say the priority is to deepen cooperation with China.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the two sides have maintained “sound cooperation in the fields of meteorology, water resources and disaster prevention and mitigation.”
“China will continue to strongly support Nepal’s disaster relief efforts, strengthen cooperation in disaster prevention and mitigation, and safeguard the common interests of the two peoples,” the ministry said in a statement.
Last week, the sudden collapse of a glacier on Nepal’s Langtang mountain range into a valley that divides Tibet and Nepal set off a catastrophic flood that killed more than 1,000 people and about 5,000 are still missing on both sides of the border.
It is unclear what data — if any — China had before the disaster of the conditions of the glaciers in the area, especially those lying outside its borders.
“Detecting such failures before they occur is extremely difficult,” Fan Xuan-mei (范宣梅), director of the State Key Laboratory of Geohazard Prevention and Geoenvironment Protection at Chengdu University of Technology, told Chinese state-run China Daily.
Potential source areas are often above 5,000m, where conventional field monitoring is difficult. Satellite observations can be limited by snow and ice cover and steep terrain, while monitoring equipment has to operate in extreme cold and high-altitude conditions.
At the meeting in Kathmandu, the Chinese officials said they did not have the mandate to sign an agreement to meet Nepal’s requests, asking for further discussions, Nepalese government hydrologist Binod Parajuli said.
Details of the meeting and Nepal’s demands for broader cooperation in monitoring the glaciers that threaten communities on both sides of the border have not previously been reported.
The Chinese embassy in Nepal said in a statement on social media on Saturday that Beijing and Kathmandu had kept in close contact on the issue and had made “substantial progress” at the meeting in May on promoting cross-border disaster information sharing.
Nepal raised similar concerns last year, officials said, although experts and officials cautioned that what they describe as slow progress was not a significant factor in the latest disaster.
Rejecting criticism from some Nepalese social media users that China had failed to provide adequate warning, the Chinese embassy said Chinese and international experts faced significant challenges monitoring hazards in the remote Himalayan region.
Chinese teams had shared important information with Nepal “in a timely manner,” it said.
At last year’s meeting, Nepal raised concerns about a flood in the same area, triggered by the sudden release of water from a glacial lake in Tibet that killed at least nine in Nepal and left more than a dozen missing.
“When the Chinese side sees a heavy precipitation forecast in the Tibet area, then they provide us that forecast and those observations,” but “not for avalanche and water level, landslides, extreme events,” Parajuli said.
China began sharing forecasts of heavy rain in Tibet over China’s WeChat messaging app and e-mail a month ago, Parajuli said.
Twelve days before the disaster, China’s World Meteorological Center told Nepalese officials in an e-mail that a monsoon depression was forecast for the area from Aug. 14 to 19.
“Enhanced rainfall is likely across much of Nepal, and we wish to draw your attention to the potential for secondary and cascading hazards, including but not limited to landslides and flash floods,” China said.
The Chinese embassy said Beijing has been sharing information including monitoring data on a lake formed by debris from last week’s calamity.
The discussions over data-sharing underline the complexity of monitoring, forecasting and providing early warning in a region where regional geopolitical rivals — including China and India — control remote mountainous areas holding vast quantities of ice and snow that loom over densely populated South Asian plains.
Last week’s catastrophe was sparked by the collapse of the glacier in a relatively unmonitored area, and a lack of bilateral cooperation was not a significant factor in Nepal’s response, said environmental anthropologist Austin Lord, senior fellow at the Washington-based Stimson Center think tank.
“That’s not to forgive the fact that there isn’t really a well-articulated system, and there is very limited exchange between Nepal and China,” said Lord, who is part of a team supporting the Nepalese government on disaster and climate risk management.
“Chinese scientists have a much greater capacity, have much greater resources for monitoring than those on the Nepal side overall,” he said.
The time that the torrent took to reach Nepal shows the value of early-warning systems, Parajuli said.
At about 8:32am Nepal time on Wednesday last week, the deluge blasted through a border crossing in Tibet as people attempted to flee, according to surveillance footage that has become a defining image of the disaster.
Twenty-six minutes later, Parajuli got a call from the chief of the Nepali National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, alerting him to a flood on the Trishuli River. Parajuli’s team found that a border monitoring station had not transmitted any data since 8:40am.
“We also then tried to contact downstream stations, but downstream stations also couldn’t post the data,” leaving the team to suspect those devices had been washed away, he said.
After contacting local Nepalese authorities to confirm the flooding, Parajuli said, his team sent a public alert to mobile phone users at 9:13.
At least four monitoring stations were destroyed by the flood that rampaged 168km downstream from the Nepal-China border, carrying about 57.4 million cubic meters of water, more than half again as much as normal, according to a Nepalese government assessment.
Surging floodwaters, which dislodged giant boulders and pulled large buildings into the overflow, damaged 19 bridges and about 40km of highway, and knocked out more than 10 percent of Nepal’s power-generation capacity, the Stimson Center said.
“It wasn’t water. It was a huge gush of mud coming straight at us,” said Keshav Prasad Baral of Tupche village, about 25km downstream of the border. “I tried to grab my wife’s hand, but she was swept away by the mud.”
When part of the glacier broke away, crashing to the valley floor hundreds of meters below, it unleashed high-speed flash floods, according to preliminary assessments by Nepalese authorities.
The Hindu Kush Himalayas, home to hundreds of millions of people from Afghanistan to Myanmar, contain the world’s largest volume of ice outside the poles, with more than 63,700 glaciers covering about 56,000km2, almost the size of Croatia, and storing up to 5,700km3 of ice.
By comparison, the glacier chunk that caused the latest disaster carried an estimated 5 million cubic meters of ice and rock, said Basanta Raj Adhikari, director of the Center for Disaster Studies in Nepal’s Tribhuvan University.
Driven by climate change, glacier melt is accelerating as snow cover declines and snowfall becomes more erratic, a 2023 study by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development showed.
These changes would increase the likelihood of floods and landslides, as mountain communities also deal with such hazards as sedimentation and erosion, the center projects.
Several of Nepal’s major river systems originate in Tibet, then flow through one of the world’s most seismically active and flood-prone regions.
Nepalese authorities would seek to work with China to conduct research and build systems to monitor avalanches and the release of water from glacial lakes — major risks for mountain communities, Parajuli said.
He said his department would propose a data-sharing agreement with China, along the lines of an arrangement that Nepal has with neighboring India, for more frequent information on precipitation and river levels, not just high-precipitation forecasts.
Nepal would seek data every 10 minutes so that “we can warn our people, save our people,” he said. “Our main target is we shouldn’t miss any future disaster.”
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